Soldier speaks with missionary he helped rescue in 1945

Retired geologist calls rescuer a hero.

Retired geologist calls rescuer a hero.

May 28, 2008

GRAND RAPIDS (AP) -- It has been 63 years since Army paratroopers overwhelmed Japanese troops guarding a Philippine prison camp and rescued 2,147 people, including five members of a missionary family from Grand Rapids. One of the paratroopers, Sgt. Frank Krhovsky, was from nearby Ionia, Mich. Riding in one of the trucks speeding away from the camp, the 19-year-old struck up a conversation with the youngest family member, Henry DeVries Jr. "'We were either going to get you out or die trying,'" Krhovsky recalled saying to DeVries as his parents, sister and older brother, David, rode in the back of the truck. It was the last contact Krhovsky would have with any of the family members until recently, when he spoke with David DeVries in a phone call arranged by The Grand Rapids Press. "Frank is one of my heroes," said David DeVries, 83, a retired geologist living in Palm Springs, Calif. "Small world, isn't it?" said Krhovsky, now 82 and a retired physician living in East Grand Rapids, Mich. The DeVries family returned to Grand Rapids and what then was the Wealthy Street Baptist Church, which had sponsored their ministry in the Philippines. Krhovsky was discharged from the Army in 1946, enrolling shortly afterward at Aquinas College and later attending the University of Michigan and Marquette University. "I tried to get ahold of them after I got back. But, after a while, you move on," he said. The Feb. 23, 1945, raid on the Los Banos prison camp spared untold numbers of captives from almost certain execution. Not one prisoner and not one American soldier died. "It's God's plan, let's put it that way, that we be liberated," said DeVries, who weighed 92 pounds when he left the prison camp with his parents, sister and brother. DeVries volunteers as a docent at the Palm Springs Air Museum, which, coincidentally, features a camouflaged C-47 transport plane like one of those that dropped Krhovsky and 130 other paratroopers over the prison camp. "It represents liberation," he said.